Pax Britannica (39 page)

And here is a settler’s family in trouble, in a favourite bush song:

This was a working-class culture—the vigour of a British proletariat offered the freedom of an empty continent. There was scarcely a soul in Australia who would not learn the story of Romeo and Juliet as told by C. J. Dennis’s larrikin in
The
Sentimental
Bloke
—the perfect comeuppance to those supposed slights of cultural superiority which colonials so often fancied and resented in Englishmen. The overseas British as a whole were rudely disrespectful to everything la-de-da: the Melbourne urchin’s approach to Shakespeare vividly expressed their ambivalent feelings towards the Old World and the Mother Country. Here are two stanzas of it:

Finally Australia gave to the Empire the best of all its marching songs, perhaps the best any Empire ever had—
Waltzing
Matilda
A balladist called A. B. Paterson (‘The Banjo’) wrote the words of this superb piece, and they were set to a tune that probably began
as a seventeenth-century English soldiers’ song,
The
Bold
Fusilier.
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The theme was scarcely heroic—a swagman caught stealing a sheep jumps into a waterhole and drowns—but the lyrics were full of broad euphonious Australianisms, billabong and coolibah, jumbuck and tucker-bag: and set to that swinging melody they seemed to sum up all the audacity of the wide horizons, that marvellous sensation of ever-open doors which many Englishmen knew for the first time in their lives, when they sailed away from the slums or rural littleness of England to the new countries of their Empire:

A
MONG the waters of the Indus Basin, stingily watered by the five rivers of the Punjab—Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej—the British created a new country. It was an uninviting part of India. For nine months of the year it was no good to man or beast, and its only inhabitants were the
janglis
—disputatious nomads who made a living from cattle-thieving, and did not much welcome strangers. There were virtually no towns or villages, no roads whatever, only a dun gloomy wasteland, with a rainfall so sparse that when it showered, so they said, one horn of a buffalo got wet, but not the other.

Along the edges of this barren place, and across it here and there, the five rivers fitfully ran, and in the last decades of the century the British conceived the idea of so tapping their waters that the whole bowl of the Indus might be irrigated and settled. Men on the spot saw this as a way of solving India’s perennial problems of famine and overcrowding. Visionary New Imperialists at home thought the Punjab might become a granary for the whole Empire, as the North African provinces had fed Rome. The latest technology was to be applied to the achievement of orderly progress and human improvement, in the best traditions of philanthropic imperialism. As they planned the great work the British knew they were following mighty and ominous precedents, for waterworks had always been the hall-marks of imperial climax. The aqueducts of the Romans strode across France and Spain masterfully, to crumble when the barbarians took over. The irrigation works of Egypt and Mesopotamia flourished under strong rulers, silted up under weak. So for the British, too, the rebirth of the Indus deserts would commemorate an Empire’s prime.

In 1897 the first of the new colonies, on the lower Chenab, was being established. The British approached the task with methodical,
Indian Civil Service care. They divided the land to be reclaimed into squares, 27½ acres apiece, to be distributed under strictly enforced conditions among carefully chosen Indian settlers. The new colonists were mostly picked from districts with traditions of good husbandry, and they were generally settled in ethnic or religious groups—Sikhs with Sikhs, Muslims with Muslims,
janglis
warily with
janglis,
wherever possible with people from their own home district and similar background. They were by no means mollycoddled. They had to sink their own wells for drinking-water, build their own houses by a specified date, plant a decreed number of trees per acre, set up their own boundary-marks, and make their own contribution to the communal amenities. Every few miles, the planners determined, there would be a village—an ideal Indian village, designed specifically for the environment, with sites for mosque, temple or Sikh shrine, a school sometimes, a few shady trees, a village shop or two, a central square with a well in it and a pond for watering the cattle. At further intervals there would be market towns, where the administrative offices would be built, the bigger shops, the processing plants, police stations, hospitals and veterinary dispensaries. A railway was thrown down the centre of the area, and a network of roads was built to link the towns and villages, the stations, the railway junctions and the river crossings: no village was more than twelve miles either from a railway station or from a market centre. Drains were cut, sewage works built, doctors and teachers and veterinary surgeons posted: and up and down the Indus basin, between the rivers, the imperial engineers cut a mesh of canals—major canals along the watershed, a filigree of lesser ones feeding towns, villages and smallholdings. The Chenab, falling out of the Himalaya, was blocked as it entered the plains, and its water was distributed evenly throughout the system.

This adventure, emulated over the years in a series of Punjab colonies, was a prodigious success. Gradually the separate settlements coalesced, the green squares of cultivation lost their awkwardness, the raw little towns matured into an untidy norm, and the irrigated country of the Indus became part of geography. A new spirit of enterprise infused the whole region: new strains of wheat, cotton and sugar-cane, too, and new ways of growing them, until
the once desolate Punjab became, if not the granary of Empire, at least one of the most prosperous of the Indian provinces. The canal provinces even showed handsome returns on the capital invested—not always bragged about, in case people demanded a reduction in the water-rates: and the British looked upon them with justifiable pride, as a diligent Pharaoh might have inspected a rising pyramid.
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The British Empire was a development agency, distributing technical knowledge around the world, and erecting what economists were later to call the infra-structure of industrial progress—roads, railways, ports, posts and telegraphs. This was not generally a deliberate process.
Laissez
faire
was still the watchword in such matters, and it was Joseph Chamberlain, moving into the Colonial Office with his brisk businessman’s efficiency, like a new chairman of the board after a successful take-over—it was Chamberlain who first saw the systematic diffusion of modern technique as a duty of Empire. To him the Empire was an undeveloped estate, and as the new chairman might invest in a computer or call in a management consultant, so he turned to science and technology to make the most of the assets. Not until the 1890s did the Colonial Office concern itself with the systematic improvement of agriculture, with veterinary medicine and husbandry, tropical disease and social welfare. In a muzzy sort of way, though, the British had long assumed these matters to be part of the stuff of imperialism—part of the civilizing process. ‘To the English people in world history’, Carlyle had written, ‘there have been, shall I prophesy, two grand tasks assigned: Huge looming the grand industrial task of conquering some half or more of this terraqueous planet for the use of man; then secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing in some pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest….’

It was a century since the chances of history had given Britain pre-eminence in the age of steam, and in fact she no longer led the world in technology. Germany and the United States had both overtaken her, and by the nineties railway engineers were crossing the Atlantic not to advise the Americans how to run their trains, but to pick up ideas from the Baltimore and Ohio. Imperialists in the field, too, were sometimes beginning to find their arts education a disadvantage. It had not mattered fifty years before, when technical development was usually a matter of digging a well or cutting a dirt track through a forest: now the jobs were more complicated, and the imperial Civil Services sometimes wished they had more scientists on the payroll. As it was, a classical education was so universally expected among senior imperial functionaries that when Joseph Thomson,
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the African explorer, wished to discuss one of the most technical of all subjects, clitoridectomy among the women of the Masai, he printed the relevant appendix to his book in Latin, to make sure it would be read only in the right quarters.

Set against the primitive expanses of the Empire, though, the technical skill of the British seemed positively demonic, and most people probably still vaguely assumed Great Britain to be the workshop of the world, the home of inventors, steelmasters and bridge-builders. ‘Whiz! Whiz! all by wheels,’ said Kinglake’s Turkish pasha in
Eothen.
‘Whiz! Whiz! all by steam! The armies of the English ride upon the vapours of boiling cauldrons, and their horses are flaming coals!’ Some such image, less vividly expressed, doubtless still entered the minds of the Empire’s simpler subjects, when they tried to conceive the power of their masters.

Some of the imperial works really were on the colossal scale. In India the whole British-built irrigation system included some 40,000 miles of canals, irrigating nearly 20 million acres—much the
greatest system of waterworks in history. The dam at Tansa, near Bombay, was claimed to be the largest piece of masonry erected in modern times: two miles long, 118 feet high, with a road along the top. In the west of India an astonishing tunnel under the rocky mountains called the Ghats conveyed water from the Periyar River, on the coastal plain, to the flatlands on the eastern side of the mountains. In the central plain almost the whole flow of the Ganges was, in winter and spring, diverted into a canal, cutting across the grain of the Himalayan drainage so boldly that for miles it leapt over or burrowed under a series of torrents and river beds, in one of the most spectacular displays of Victorian technique.

In Canada the Welland Canal had been cut to circumvent Niagara, in Australia water was piped 350 miles to the Kalgoorlie goldfields, and in Egypt the British had remodelled the entire irrigation system, basing it for the first time on perennial irrigation—storing water in times of plenty, releasing it in times of drought. This was the Empire’s one lasting contribution to the welfare of the Egyptians. It was not all disinterested altruism, for the British wanted Egyptian cotton for the mills of Lancashire, but it did much to release the peasant from the old bondage of pasha and moneylender. Sir Benjamin Baker, designer of the Forth Bridge, was already building the Aswan Dam, one of the great engineering works of the world, which was to create a storage reservoir north of Wadi Halfa. Downstream a series of lesser barrages diverted water into the farmlands of middle Egypt, and below Cairo the Delta barrage raised the level of the water to supply three large feeder canals. Much of this work was done by engineers on loan from India. All the way along the lower Nile, from Damietta and Rosetta on the Mediterranean to remote upriver stations only now being established by Kitchener’s armies, imperial engineers and agronomists were at work: but the upper Nile was a closed book to them, no information reached them from the troubled Sudan, and they could not forecast the height of a flood, or know when to expect it. It was as though the great river flowed into the floodlights of Empire out of an immeasurable cavern.

It was not an age of great roads, and by the end of the century few of the roads the British were building were on the grand scale: roads into the Ashanti country, to keep the defeated kingdom down,
into northern Burma and Rhodesia, into the mountainous interior of Ceylon to supply the new tea plantations—none too soon, it seems, for not so long before, when a Glasgow financier had visited the island to inspect his
£
100,000 property there, he had taken one look at the frightful roads, returned to Scotland by the next boat, and sold the estate. Not many of the imperial roads were surfaced, and most were very elementary. In the open frontier country of India they used simply to light a fire at a distant point, and aim their road at the smoke.

Here and there across the Empire, though, strategic highways built before the steam age carried the proper Roman stamp. One was Thomas Telford’s celebrated road from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, which swept superbly through the wild Welsh highlands, crossed the Menai Straits by a revolutionary suspension bridge, and arrived at the Irish Sea in a lather of breakwaters and fortifications, looking across to Dublin with an imperious air—ready to keep the Anglo-Irish stocked with almanacs and saddle-leather, or ship another battalion of infantry to keep the peasantry in order. Even grander were the transcontinental roads of India, sometimes laid by the British on older foundations, with lofty names and romantic itineraries: the Hindustan-Tibet Road, which Lord Dalhousie had decreed in 1850 to link the British and the Chinese Empires, running up from the plains to Simla to peter out in the inaccessible Himalaya; or the Grand Trunk Road, which crossed India from one side to the other, Calcutta to Delhi, Delhi to Lahore and the frontiers of Afghanistan—deserted by the British since the railways came, but still redolent with splendid names and memories, and marked every two miles by a stone tower, like an imperial highway of the Caesars.

A broad beaten track across the Egyptian desert preserved the memory of the Overland Route. Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn,
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Royal Navy, had created this way to India, spending most of his life on it, until in the 1840s the P. and O. company took it over. Passengers and mail were disembarked at Alexandria, and sent up
the Nile by steamer to Cairo: there they were transferred to horse-drawn vans, and off they went across the Overland Route to Suez and the India boats. There were seven relay stations on the desert track, with food, fresh horses and the inevitable champagne, and for thirty years the service was the chief mail route from Britain to India. The railway to Suez killed it, and the cutting of the Suez Canal: but in 1897 its wide track across the desert was still used by camel-trains and solitary travellers, one or two of its rest-houses were still perceptibly in business, and imperialists of a romantic turn could still imagine their forebears, in nets, goggles, topees and mufflers against the sand, bowling across the waste towards their empires in the east.
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